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This has been all over the news in Charlotte and Jerry Richardson is taking a beating for it...

Leaked NFL Documents: While Owner Cried Hardship, Carolina Panthers Had $112 Million Profit Over Two Years

In 2010 and 2011, as the NFL prepared for and staged a lockout of its players, Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson was among the hardest of the hardliners, urging his fellow owners to "take back our league" by demanding a more management-friendly collective-bargaining agreement. Meanwhile, according to an audited financial statement obtained by Deadspin, Richardson's Panthers were making more than $100 million in profit over the fiscal years covering those two seasons.

The statement is for the years ending March 31, 2011, and March 31, 2012. Over the first period, as Richardson argued that the NFL's business model was hopelessly broken and steered the owners toward a showdown to extract more money from the players, the Panthers recorded an operating profit of $78.7 million. The team had gone 2-14 on the field, but Richardson and his partners were able to pay themselves $12 million.

Over the following year, after the owners had won their lockout and reduced the players' share of league revenue from 50 percent to 47 percent, the Panthers brought in $33.3 million in operating profit. Richardson began lobbying for public subsidies to renovate his 17-year-old stadium. The team went 6-10.

The pro football business was very good in Carolina in those two years, even if the pro football wasn't. That much is evident from the document, which can be found at the bottom of the post and which offers a rare look inside an NFL club's books.

Team financials in all sports are closely guarded documents, particularly because so much league businessóstadium deals with municipalities, negotiations with players unionsórelies on obscuring the owners' financial picture. During collective bargaining in 2011, the NFL players union repeatedly asked owners to open their books. They were repeatedly denied.

"These franchises are a license to print money," says Dennis Howard, a business professor at the University of Oregon, who looked over the Panthers' financial statement at Deadspin's request. "This team is pretty damn healthy," he says, and its financial outlook is "very bright," citing the new, owner-friendly collective bargaining agreement and the league's fat new TV contract, signed in 2011, which kicks in next year. Under the terms of that deal, Howard estimates, the Panthers could bring in an additional $60-$65 million in annual TV revenue alone.

Richardson's public posture over the past two years certainly hasn't suggested a man presiding over a twentysomething percent profit margin in one of the NFL's smaller markets. He was management's point person in labor negotiations. A witness told Yahoo's Michael Silver about a March 2010 meeting at which Richardson addressed his fellow owners: "Jerry said, 'We signed a [expletive] deal last time, and we're going to stick together and take back our league and [expletive] do something about it.' He was practically yelling. It was amazing, and it set an incredible tone." In one memorable press conference before the work stoppage, Richardson, now 76 years old, drew a crude pie chart that showed the players swallowing up a preponderance of league revenue.